Quotes from Greg Egan

The only way up is up.

But if he starts to get you down, just remember: everything he says comes from halfway up his anus.

That's it. That's all there is. The cosmos has no shape at all – no such thing as time or distance, no physical laws, no cause and effect.

No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.   I

the formal structural descriptions full of cis-1,3-dimethyl-this and 2,5-di-tert-butyl-that

a lot of bored, aimless people who'd never really found any purpose. But then they realised that they could fill that hole by inventing a grievance, and taking sides, and refusing to be swayed no matter what.

The campsite was like a pinprick of awareness, poised between fading memories and the unknown future—and if daybreak and the journey home would reclaim some of what the darkness now shrouded, that reprieve itself was only temporary.

Freud had saddled Western culture with the bizarre notion that the least considered utterances were always, magically, the truest-that reflection added nothing, and the ego merely censored or lied. It was an idea born more of convenience than anything else: he'd identified the part of the mind easiest to circumvent-with tricks like free association-and then declared the product of all that remained to be "honest.

Leila just mentally tagged the three of them with randomly chosen, slightly exotic names – Tim, John and Sarah.

Sometimes I wonder if my stability has anything to do with me; maybe the real constant is the way I've been prepared. Maybe an infinite number of different people, put through the same process, would all emerge the same. Have all emerged the same. I don't know.

Okay. Exorcism time. Repeat after me: Uncle Sigmund, I renounce you as a charlatan, a bully, and a fabricator of data. A cor-rupter of language, a destroyer of lives

Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.

I look up at her. "Let's not make a big deal of this. It's time for me to become a machine.

The truth is whatever you can't escape.

Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.

Every democracy was a kind of anarchy in slow motion: any statute, any constitution could be changed, given time; any social contract, written or unwritten, could be dishonoured.

Go on. I'm waiting for you to get to the part where you say you're no more proud of being gay than you are of having brown eyes, or black hair, or a birthmark behind your left knee." I protested, "That's true. Why should I be 'proud' of something I was born with? I'm not proud, or ashamed. I just accept it. And I don't have to join a parade to prove that.

You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist," Stoney muttered. "Doubly?" "Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained, guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futile losing side.

The wormhole makes tangible the most basic truths of existence. You cannot see the future. You cannot change the past. All of life consists of running into darkness. This is why I'm here.

That was the hazard she'd face every day, here: not just the risk that she'd give in to temptation, but the risk that all the principles she'd chosen to define herself would come to seem like nothing but masochistic nonsense.

Recalculate. Then show me sunrise again.

Kate had made both the environment and the body for him, and he liked the tranquil mood of the piece. There was no invented family, no role to play; this was a painting, not a drama. One place, one moment, lasting as long as he chose to inhabit it.

Whatever elaborate, and grotesquely counter-intuitive, underpinnings there might be to familiar reality, it stubbornly continues to be familiar. When Rutherford showed that atoms were mostly empty space, did the ground become any less solid? The truth itself changes nothing.

Aden would phone before he left, trying to patch things up, but she could see how easy it would be, now, to break things off permanently. And now that it had reached that stage, it seemed like the obvious thing to do. She wasn't upset, or relieved - just calm. It always made her feel that way: burning bridges, driving people away. Simplifying her life.